Mass Media Meltdown?

John Podhoretz explains what's going on with the mass media and why the numbers are down in virtually every news/entertainment venue. So what's going on?

There are compelling individual explanations for these phenomena. For instance, this year's movies have been extraordinarily uninteresting. And the collapse in newspaper circulation may simply be the result of more honest reporting on the part of publishers chastened by the public exposure last year of fraudulent numbers at papers like Newsday and the Dallas Morning News.

But it can't be a coincidence that the five major pillars of the American media — movies, television, radio, recorded music and newspapers — are all suffering at the same time. And it isn't. Something major has changed over the past year, as the availability of alternative sources of information and entertainment has finally reached critical mass.

Newly empowered consumers are letting the producers, creators and managers of the nation's creative and news content know that they are dissatisfied with the product they're being peddled.

Take the moviegoing audience. For 25 years, people have been watching movies at home on video and DVD. But only in the past year or so have people been able to afford big flat screens in their homes that offer an aural and visual experience superior in many ways to a movie theater's.

The $2,000 price tag for that TV doesn't seem so steep when you consider that an average married couple has to pay upwards of $70 ($22 for two tickets, another $15 for soda and popcorn for two, parking fees, babysitter) to attend a single film. And it doesn't seem like that much of a treat when the movie is being projected onto a filthy piece of billowing white canvas that is never cleaned.

And so it goes. Satellite radio makes it possible for people willing to spend $12 a month to listen to superb sound quality without commercials. TiVo and digital video recorders have finally made it easy for people to watch the TV programs they want to watch whenever they want to watch them. And it goes without saying that the Internet has transformed the way people interested in news can get their information.

It also goes without saying that the owners and distributors of old media aren't just going to go quietly into that good night. These are still unimaginably valuable platforms. But the key will be understanding that the self-satisfied conduct of media professionals — peddling unwatchable nonsense in Hollywood and on TV, and foisting politically correct pseudo-information on increasingly sophisticated consumers of news — isn't going to hack it any longer.